The World's Only Mega-Bomber

THERE is a quote often attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, that it might have "awakened a sleeping giant." A similar simile is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit with a few variations: "China is a sleeping giant/dragon/lion."

- KAJAL BASU

That the quotes are apocryphal is beside the point. They indicated directions in which the countries were likely to go. In the event, America got there first: it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becoming the first and only country in the world to have deployed nuclear weapons. China took a half-century more to get to a place where it can use nuclear weapons—but has refrained, as a matter of policy, from even hinting at the possibility of ever using them.

The US went on to design other big bombs: the 6,800-kg 'daisy cutter', which it used in Vietnam, the Gulf War and outside the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan in 2001. When it was 'retired' in 2008, it was replaced with the 9,850 kg Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, or 'mother of all bombs') first used in 2017 in Afghanistan and still in stock. And in 2011, the US made the 'biggest bomb of them all'—the 12,304-kg Massive Ordnance Penetrator or 'bunker buster'. After 14 years of aggregating 20 of these gigabombs, the US used them on Iran.

In effect, in order to escape proscriptions in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons or NPT, to which the US is a founder-signatory, America went the way of non-nuclear devices with the explosive output of a small, tactical nuclear bomb.